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South Asia Investor Review is focused on reporting, analyzing and discussing the economy and the financial markets of countries in South Asia, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. For investors looking to invest in emerging markets beyond BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), this blog is designed to help international investors looking to learn about investing in South Asia with focus on Pakistan. Riaz has another blog called Haq's Musings at http://www.riazhaq.com

Data shows that Pakistan's literacy and enrollment rates are not rising in spite of significantly increased education spending over the last several years. Education budgets at federal and provincial levels have seen double digit increase of 17.5% a year on average since 2010. And yet, school enrollment and literacy rate have remained essentially flat during this period. This lack of progress in education stands in sharp contrast to the significant improvements in outcomes seen from increase education spending during Musharraf years in 2001-2008. Why is it?

Is the money not being spent honestly and wisely? Is the education budget being used by the ruling politicians to create teacher jobs solely for political patronage? Are the teachers not showing up for work? Is the money being siphoned off by bureaucrats and politicians by hiring "ghost teachers" in "ghost schools"? Let's try and examine the data and the causes of lack of tangible results from education spending.

Pakistan Education Budget:

The total money budgeted for education by the governments at the federal and provincial levels has increased from Rs. 304 billion in 2010-11 to Rs. 790 billion in 2016-17, representing an average of 17.5% increase per year since 2010.

Education and Literacy Rates:

Pakistan's net primary enrollment rose from 42% in 2001-2002 to 57% in 2008-9 during Musharraf years. It has been essentially flat at 57% since 2009 under PPP and PML(N) governments.

Similarly, the literacy rate for Pakistan 10 years or older rose from 45% in 2001-2002 to 56% in 2007-2008 during Musharraf years. It has increased just 4% to 60% since 2009-2010 under PPP and PML(N) governments.

Human development index reports on Pakistan released by UNDP confirm the ESP 2015 human development trends.Pakistan’s HDI value for 2013 is 0.537— which is in the low human development category—positioning the country at 146 out of 187 countries and territories. Between 1980 and 2013, Pakistan’s HDI value increased from 0.356 to 0.537, an increase of 50.7 percent or an average annual increase of about 1.25.

Overall, Pakistan's human development score rose by 18.9% during Musharraf years and increased just 3.4% under elected leadership since 2008. The news on the human development front got even worse in the last three years, with HDI growth slowing down as low as 0.59% — a paltry average annual increase of under 0.20 per cent.

Going further back to the decade of 1990s when the civilian leadership of the country alternated between PML (N) and PPP, the increase in Pakistan's HDI was 9.3% from 1990 to 2000, less than half of the HDI gain of 18.9% on Musharraf's watch from 2000 to 2007.

Bogus Teachers in Sindh:

In 2014, Sindh's provincial education minister Nisar Ahmed Khuhro said that "a large number of fake appointments were made in the education department during the previous tenure of the PPP government" when the ministry was headed by Khuhru's predecessor PPP's Peer Mazhar ul Haq. Khuhro was quoted by Dawn newspaper as saying that "a large number of bogus appointments of teaching and non-teaching staff had been made beyond the sanctioned strength" and without completing legal formalities as laid down in the recruitment rules by former directors of school education Karachi in connivance with district officers during 2012–13.

Ghost Schools in Balochistan:

In 2016, Balochistan province's education minister Abdur Rahim Ziaratwal was quoted by Express Tribune newspaper as telling his provincial legislature that “about 900 ghost schools have been detected with 300,000 fake registrations of students, and out of 60,000, 15,000 teachers’ records are unknown.”

Absentee Teachers in Punjab:

A 2013 study conducted in public schools in Bhawalnagar district of Punjab found that 27.5% of the teachers are absent from classrooms from 1 to 5 days a month while 3.75% are absent more than 10 days a month. The absentee rate in the district's private schools was significantly lower. Another study by an NGO Alif Ailan conducted in Gujaranwala and Narowal reported that "teacher absenteeism has been one of the key impediments to an effective and working education apparatus."

Political Patronage:

Pakistani civilian rule has been characterized by a system of political patronage that doles out money and jobs to political party supporters at the expense of the rest of the population. Public sector jobs, including those in education and health care sectors, are part of this patronage system that was described by Pakistani economist Dr. Mahbub ul Haq, the man credited with the development of United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) as follows:

"...every time a new political government comes in they have to distribute huge amounts of state money and jobs as rewards to politicians who have supported them, and short term populist measures to try to convince the people that their election promises meant something, which leaves nothing for long-term development. As far as development is concerned, our system has all the worst features of oligarchy and democracy put together." Summary:

Education spending in Pakistan has increased at an annual average rate of 17.5% since 2010. However, the school enrollment and literacy rates have remained flat and the human development indices are stuck in neutral. This is in sharp contrast to the significant improvements in outcomes from increased education spending seen during Musharraf years in 2001-2008. An examination of the causes shows that the corrupt system of political patronage tops the list. This system jeopardizes the future of the country by producing ghost teacher, ghost schools and absentee staff to siphon off the money allocated for children's education.

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Fresh corporate investments (in India) grew at the slowest pace since 1992 in the 2016-17 financial yearAnalysts said a poor demand in the economy and banks’ reluctance to lend to new projects had led to this decline.

Fresh investments by the corporate sector in the financial year 2016-17 grew at the slowest pace since 1992, Business Standard reported on Saturday. In FY 2017, the combined capital expenditure by the country’s top 1,000 non-financial firms, in terms of revenue, was up by just 5.8% – the previous low of capital expenditure growth was recorded in 1999.

Analysts said this decline was because of poor demand in the economy and banks’ reluctance to lend to new projects.

“It’s in line with a near – collapse in banks’ credit growth in the last fiscal year,” said G Chokkalingam, founder and managing director, Equinomics Research and Advisory. “Public sector banks have put a virtual freeze on fresh lending to risky projects, fearing bad loans hitting funding for large industrial projects.”

Fresh investments, worth Rs 2.07 lakh crore, by the top 1,000 companies in the last fiscal was down from Rs 2.9 lakh crore in FY16 and an all-time high of Rs 5.7 lakh crore in FY14.

The drought, led by domestic private companies, is in complete contrast to their past behavior, an analysis of a common sample of listed companies suggested. The capex growth registered by private sector companies is also the slowest in 12 years.

The incremental capex by listed private companies was Rs 2.15 lakh crore in 2016. It nearly halved to around Rs 1.1 lakh crore in the last financial year. The amount is a third of a record high reached in 2012 and the lowest in 10 years.

On top of these new taxation measures, the government has been withholding refunds of businesses of around Rs150bn to Rs200bn while collecting advance tax to bolster its revenue performance under the IMF programme. Measures such as the foregoing in particular, including the levying of sales tax of up to 52pc on high speed diesel, a main stay input for the entire economy, have been particularly damaging for industry.

In terms of borrowing, the government’s debt-accumulation since 2013 has pushed up total public debt from nearly Rs14.5 trillion in FY13 to around Rs21.5tr by June 2017 — adding Rs7tr in just four years. More worryingly, the PML-N government has contracted new foreign loans of nearly $40bn in four years, an unprecedented amount, pushing total public external debt outstanding in net terms (after repayments), from $51bn in June 2013 to $62bn at the end of March 2017.

Under the third leg of economic policy under Mr Dar, the exchange rate has appreciated 26pc in real effective terms since December 2013 — hurting exports while giving a boost to all manner of imports including non-essential consumer and luxury items. In addition, the overvalued exchange rate has acted as a spur to capital flight from the country.

A combination of unaddressed structural challenges from the past, and Mr Dar’s policy framework since 2013, has resulted in Pakistan’s export sector (manufactured goods) shrinking to 6.9pc of GDP from around 14pc in the mid-2000s.

So the first order of business for the new PML-N prime minister should be to undo the punishing taxation burden on industry imposed by Mr Dar’s policies, and to rectify the policy framework in ways that will boost industry, in particular exports, in the long run. With Pakistan no more sleepwalking into a balance of payments crisis but sliding into one (even with international oil prices at around $50!), the government’s policy space and options are becoming limited. It, or its successor, will need to begin talking to the IMF for a new loan programme sooner rather than later, which will curtail freedom of movement for introducing industry- and investment-friendly policies.

However, some immediate concrete policy measures to reduce the cost of doing business in the country (on the taxation side), combined with a strong signal that the PML-N government is moving away from Mr Dar’s damaging economic policies, will be welcome as well as hopeful news for Pakistani industry.

Tailpiece: Thank God for the PPP government in Sindh! In a huge service to real democracy, its uninterrupted misrule since 2008 has buried some apologetic myths forwarded since the July 28 Supreme Court ruling to ‘defend’ the pathetic non-performance of political governments.

With the military commanding the heights in foreign and security policy, and not in terms of economic governance, it cannot be blamed if Thari children die each year due to lack of medicines in public hospitals, or if roads in Larkana are in a shambles, or there are heaps of uncollected garbage in Karachi. With around Rs2,100bn transferred to Sindh from the centre since 2013 under the National Finance Commission awards, in addition to the nearly Rs200bn tax collected by Sindh itself over this period, the issue is not even of money.

It boils down to corruption pure and simple. Large-scale, pervasive and systemic corruption has been widely documented as the undoing of many resource-rich but underdeveloped countries, particularly in Africa, which have no civil-military imbalances to worry about. Regular, ongoing attempts to shift the blame from bad governance and grand corruption (political sleaze) to tensions in civil-military relations are disingenuous as well as a disservice.

The United Kingdom strongly supports ASER, this is the only citizen-led independent assessment of Education and it is also an important tool for citizen’s accountability. We as DFID have been supporting ASER since its launch years ago, and we will continue to support the cause for better of the society, said Joanna Reid while addressing the panelists.

The number of out-of-the-school children has dropped significantly from 25 million to 22 million according to the government data. However, it’s still not enough, there is a lot more to be done. We should not compromise on access to schools, our main focus should be on improving quality, the education budget was increased this year which is a good sign towards development but still short in achieving targets, from 2.83% of GDP the budget allocation this year was 3.02%, Joanna added.

Education and economic development are correlated with each other, economic growth in Pakistan heavily relies on education, Pakistan has a larger segment of population which is aged between 10 to 24 years according to population Council, 61 million young people can really make a difference if they are equipped with required education and skills, if half of them are not, Pakistan will not be able to meet its workforce needs in the future to continue economic growth, she said.

The ASER meeting was organized by Idra-e-Taleem-o-Agahi with other partners of ASER in Serena Hotel. Key personalities from Federal government Education department, National Assembly, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and Human Rights Activists were among the Panelists.

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > PAKISTANASER Survey 2016: More students enrolling in public schools in ICThttps://tribune.com.pk/story/1472658/aser-survey-2016-students-enrolling-public-schools-ict/

Even as the government enhanced the education budget and is seen to be making concerted efforts to boost school enrollment in the country, the proportion of out-of-school children is still the same when compared to 2015.

This was stated in Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016 national survey report launched on Wednesday.

The seventh version of the citizen-led household-based survey, managed by the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) in partnership with a number of key civil society and semi-autonomous bodies including the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) and others, found that 19% of children between the ages of 6-16 are still out-of-school. The remaining 81% which are attending school are not learning much either.

The ASER rural survey assessed 216,365 children between the ages of 5-16 years cohort in language (Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, English), and Arithmetic competencies.

The report noted that almost all parts of Pakistan including Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) recorded some increase in enrollment figures from 1.4% to 4.5%.

However, at the same time, there was a considerable shift from public to private schools in most parts of the country.

The ASER 2016 rural results showed that 26% of children between the ages 6-16 years of age go to non-state schools. This was up from 24% last year.

Only the Punjab and the Islamabad Capital Territory registered a positive shift in enrollment in public schools.

Early Childhood Education (ECE) in rural parts of Pakistan has been on a declining trend, falling from 39% in 2014 to 36% in 2016.

Overall, government schools have witnessed a fall of 7.5% (63% overall) in enrollment for ECE, while the private sector continues to hold a 37% slice of total enrollment.

“There are 61 million young people in Pakistan aged 10 to 24 years as per the estimates of Population Council. Their ability and skills will play a major role in making Pakistan prosperous and a successful player in global economy,” said head of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) Joanna Reid at the launch of the report.

“If half of them [youngsters] are not equipped to do their job, Pakistan will not be able to meet the workforce needs of its economy.”

Dipping competencies

The report further notes that student competencies, especially in learning English, Arithmetic, and other languages have dipped.

As many as 48% of children from class V cannot read a class-II-level-story written in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto.

In English, only 46% Class V students surveyed could read sentences, which should ideally be read by students of the second grade. Arithmetic learning levels too showed a decline with only 48% of class V children able to complete a two-digit division, something which is expected in the second grade.

The report revealed that only AJK showed substantial improvement in English and Arithmetic with 17% and 29% respective increase from 2015 results.

Punjab registered a solitary increase in Arithmetic learnings over scores from 2015. The survey further showed that children enrolled in private schools continued to perform better as compared to those studying in government-run schools. As many as 66% of children enrolled in Class-V in private schools were able to read a story written in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto.

The difference in learning levels for English was starker with 65% of grade V students able to read a class-II-level sentence.

For arithmetic, 64% of children enrolled in class V could complete a two-digit division. While the gap was narrower in some provinces, the gap was a consistent feature.

Back in 2015 the Economist published an article called “Learning Unleashed”, which breathlessly declared Punjab, Pakistan to be the “new standard bearer for market-based education reform”. No matter there isn’t really any evidence that learning has been improved, never mind unleashed, what the article described is just about the opposite of a market-based reform. Through voucher and subsidy schemes, Punjab’s government injects public finance into private schools. Similarly, in the southern province of Sindh, the state is fully financing the education of hundreds of thousands of kids enrolled in private schools. And in both provinces it is the state, not the market, that sets the rules of the game.

Kids in Pakistan’s schools aren’t learning. And they’re the lucky ones who are actually in schoolTest scores suggest that children in Pakistan are performing well below curricular standards. Although, unlike in India, their test scores have not worsened over time, like almost every other developing country they are not improving. Data from ASER makes for grim reading: less than a third of grade five children from the wealthiest quintile have the numeracy and literacy skills that are expected of a child in grade two. Just 17 percent of grade five kids from the poorest quintile can read a single sentence. Remember, these are the kids who managed to make it to grade five – in other words, they’ve sat through at least five years of schooling and 83 percent of them still can’t read a sentence.

As for those who aren’t in school, Pakistan’s Bureau of Statistics estimates that there are 5.6 million primary age out-of-school kids (note that this figure is based on the 1998 census, and so the true number could well be substantially higher or lower).

The twin ”crises”of low and static test scores, combined with millions of kids not in school, has led to a proliferation of education reforms. These include policies that aim to harness the vibrant and growing private education sector.

With education in crisis, government turned to the private sector for helpProvincial leaders in Punjab and Sindh are taking bold steps to reform their failing education systems. They’ve moved fast, particularly in Punjab where the Economist’s Learning Unleashed article is framed and proudly mounted on several government office walls.

Together, the PPPs in Punjab and Sindh make up one of the largest and fastest-growing public private partnerships in the world. More than three million kids in the two provinces are enrolled in around ten thousand private primary schools, with the cost of their education fully financed by the state. They’re managed by semi-autonomous entities, the Sindh Education Foundation and the Punjab Education Foundation, whose funding is almost entirely provided by their provincial governments.

So-called low-cost private schools are a growing and increasingly popular option in poor countries. These private schools usually spend less per student than government-run schools, holding down costs by paying their teachers lower salaries than in the government system. Although the teachers often are not as formally qualified as teachers in the government schools, students in these private schools tend to do as well or better than their counterparts in the other schools. One question is how to encourage these schools to expand beyond primary education, and how to encourage them to make further investments in the education they offer. This evaluation of a new financing mechanism for low-cost private schools in Pakistan will help policymakers understand their options for supporting these schools, allowing them to harness the power of the market rather than relying on greater public subsidies to the private sector.

Context

Since 1980, the number of private schools in Pakistan has grown from about 3,000 to about 45,000. Nearly one-third of all primary school children in Pakistan country attend private schools, covering all income spectrums. A 2001 survey showed that about one in five of Pakistan’s poorest families sends their children to private village schools.

Children in these private schools tend to outperform those in public schools, while costs per student can be 20 to 50 percent lower than those in public schools, generally because these private schools hire less-qualified local teachers at lower wages. Despite these advantages, private school growth may be limited by the lack of financing possibilities. This evaluation assesses the benefits of different financing models for encouraging school expansion.

Authority over education is devolved to Pakistan’s four provinces, and Punjab’s energetic chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of the prime minister, Nawaz, has decreed that the government will not build any of the new schools needed to achieve its 100% enrolment target for school-age children by 2018. Instead money is being funnelled to the private sector via the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), an independent body with a focus on extremely poor families.

One scheme helps entrepreneurs set up new schools, particularly in rural areas. Another gives vouchers to parents living in slums to send children who are not in school to PEF-approved institutions. All the places in some schools have also been bought up. Those schools cannot charge fees and must submit to monitoring and teacher training. Although the funding per pupil is less than half of what is spent by state schools, results are at least as good, says Aneela Salman, PEF’s managing director. “The private sector can be much more flexible about who it hires, and can set up schools quickly in rented buildings and hire teachers from the local community.”

Crucially, the province is also improving oversight and working out how to inform parents about standards. It has dispatched 1,000 inspectors armed with tablet computers to conduct basic checks on whether schools are operating and staff and children are turning up. They have begun quizzing teachers, using questions from the exams they are meant to be teaching their pupils to pass. The early results, says one official grimly, are “not good”.

In a joint study by the World Bank, Harvard University and Punjab’s government, parents in some villages were given report cards showing the test scores of their children and the average for schools nearby, both public and private. A year later participating villages had more children in school and their test scores in maths, English and Urdu were higher than in comparable villages where the cards were not distributed. The scheme was very cheap, and the improvement in results larger than that from some much pricier interventions, such as paying parents to send their children to school.

PEF now educates 2m of Punjab’s 25m children, a share likely to grow by another million by 2018. Meanwhile the number of state schools has fallen by around 2,000 as some have been merged and others closed. Such a wholesale shift to private-sector provision would create a storm of protest in Britain, whose Department for International Development is backing Punjab’s reforms. But there are few signs of anxiety in a country where many parents aspire to send their children to a private school and the country’s recent Nobel laureate, the education activist Malala Yousafzai, is the daughter of a private-school owner.

Since 2010, Pakistan has more than doubled what it budgets for education, from $3.5 billion to $8.6 billion a year. The budget for education now rivals the official $8.7 billion military budget. The teaching force is as big as the armed forces.

But Pakistan has a learning crisis that afflicts its schoolchildren despite much debate and increase in funding for education because policy interventions by the government and foreign donors misdiagnosed what is keeping children out of school.

...... the demand for education is already high, evidenced by the mushrooming of low-cost private schools that now enroll 40 percent of students in the country and charge as little as $2 a month.

Foreign donors also want Pakistanis to send their girls to schools, but a 2014 Pew survey found that 86 percent of Pakistanis believe that education is equally important for boys and girls, while another 5 percent said it was more important for girls. Even in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — where Malala Yousafzai is from — government high schools for girls are enrolled beyond their capacity.

Pakistan’s education crisis is a supply-side problem. Enrollment rates are used as the measure for progress because Pakistan has the second-largest population of out-of-school children in the world. But the proportion of 5- to 9-year-olds in school is the same as it was in 2010: 57 percent. With teachers chronically absent from school at a rate of 20 to 30 percent and most of the education budget going into their above-market salaries ($150 to $1,000 a month), doubling the budget was never the solution to Pakistan’s education crisis.

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Eighteen million of the 23 million out-of-school children in Pakistan are between 10 and 16 years old. Efforts to reach them have been negligible. These children opted out of a failing education system and now they have aged. They will not now go to school if it means starting in kindergarten. They need accelerated programs, or short crash courses in literacy and math to help them enroll with their age group.

Even if these children do not go back to school — international evidence suggests they won’t — they will, at least, become literate adults.

Despite the fact that Bangladesh made considerable progress in gross-enrolment in primary education for both genders, the country is seriously lagging behind in ensuring quality education for all. Because data for many of the targets related to Goal 4 are not available, we have studied a few available indicators which are consistent with the goal 4.

If we consider the average years of schooling as an indication of the status of education of any country, during the years between 2010-2015, this number for Bangladesh was only 5.1 which was higher than Pakistan (4.9) but lower than India (5.8). However, Bangladesh was far behind Sri Lanka (10.9) and some of leading Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia (10.1), Thailand (7.7) and Vietnam (7.8).

Two important indicators related to the quality of educational infrastructure are "percent share of trained teachers in total teachers in primary education" and "pupil-teacher ratio in primary education". During the years between 2010-2015, in the case of trained teachers, Bangladesh (53 percent) performed very poorly compared to India (77.2 percent), Pakistan (83.7 percent), Sri Lanka (79.1 percent), Malaysia (97.2 percent), Thailand (100 percent) and Vietnam (100 percent). In the case of pupil-teacher ratio, though Bangladesh (39.8) performed better than Pakistan (42.8), it performed worse than India (32.5), Sri Lanka (23.8), Malaysia (11.9), Thailand (16.1) and Vietnam (19.4).

Regrettably, Bangladesh is among the bottom in the list of countries in the world with the lowest ratio of public expenditure on education to GDP, which is only 2.1 percent. This ratio is 3.7 percent in India, 5.4 percent in Malaysia, 4.3 percent in Thailand, and 5.3 percent in Vietnam. This is one of the reasons why the private spending on education as a share of household monthly expenditure is much higher in Bangladesh compared to those of other South Asian countries. According to the latest available Household Income and Expenditure Surveys of five South Asian countries, the share of private expenditure on education in the average monthly household expenditure in Bangladesh is around 5.5 percent, 2.6 percent in India, 4.8 percent in Nepal, 2.5 percent in Pakistan, and 1.9 percent in Sri Lanka. This suggests that the responsibility of education expenditure heavily falls on households in Bangladesh, and the government's role is yet to be ideal.

Mobile school opens in Cholistanhttps://www.samaa.tv/education/2017/11/mobile-school-opens-cholistan/BAHAWALPUR: Under the auspices of Punjab Education Foundation, a mobile school was inaugurated in Nawa Kot area of Cholistan desert to impart education to local children.According to a press release issued here on Friday, Chairman, Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), Raja Qamar-ul-Islam inaugurated mobile school in Nawa Kot area of Cholistan desert falling within jurisdiction of tehsil Liaquat Pur.Speaking on the occasion, he said that mobile school would help in spreading education. He said that local children of Cholistan desert who have no access to school would be beneficiary of mobile school system. “PEF is working on agenda of Parha Likha Punjab,” he said.Local notables including Chairman Union Council, Chak-178 and others were present. – APP

A political machine is a political group in which an authoritative boss or small group commands the support of a corps of supporters and businesses (usually campaign workers), who receive rewards for their efforts. The machine's power is based on the ability of the workers to get out the vote for their candidates on election day.

Although these elements are common to most political parties and organizations, they are essential to political machines, which rely on hierarchy and rewards for political power, often enforced by a strong party whip structure. Machines sometimes have a political boss, often rely on patronage, the spoils system, "behind-the-scenes" control, and longstanding political ties within the structure of a representative democracy. Machines typically are organized on a permanent basis instead of a single election or event. The term may have a pejorative sense referring to corrupt political machines.[1]

The term "political machine" dates back to the 20th century in the United States, where such organizations have existed in some municipalities and states since the 18th century. Similar machines have been described in Latin America, where the system has been called clientelism or political clientelism (after the similar Clientela relationship in the Roman Republic), especially in rural areas, and also in some African states and other emerging democracies, like postcommunist Eastern European countries. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is often cited as another political machine, maintaining power in suburban and rural areas through its control of farm bureaus and road construction agencies.[2] In Japan, the word jiban (literally "base" or "foundation") is the word used for political machines.

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Theodore Roosevelt, before he became president in 1901, was deeply involved in New York City politics. He explains how the machine worked:

The organization of a party in our city is really much like that of an army. There is one great central boss, assisted by some trusted and able lieutenants; these communicate with the different district bosses, whom they alternately bully and assist. The district boss in turn has a number of half-subordinates, half-allies, under him; these latter choose the captains of the election districts, etc., and come into contact with the common heelers

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The corruption of urban politics in the United States was denounced by private citizens. They achieved national and state civil-service reform and worked to replace local patronage systems with civil service. By Theodore Roosevelt's time, the Progressive Era mobilized millions of private citizens to vote against the machines

Pakistan has long been home to a flourishing market of low-cost private schools, as parents have given up on a dysfunctional state sector and opted instead to pay for a better alternative. In the province of Punjab alone the number of these schools has risen from 32,000 in 1990 to 60,000 by 2016. (England has just 24,000 schools, albeit much bigger ones.)

More recently, Pakistani policymakers have begun to use these private schools to provide state education. Today Pakistan has one of the largest school-voucher schemes in the world. It has outsourced the running of more government-funded schools than any other developing country. By the end of this year Punjab aims to have placed 10,000 public schools—about the number in all of California—in the hands of entrepreneurs or charities. Although other provinces cannot match the scope and pace of reforms in Punjab, which is home to 53% of Pakistanis, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are implementing some similar changes on a smaller scale.

The results are promising—and they hold lessons for reformers in other countries. One is that “public-private partnerships” can improve children’s results while costing the state less than running schools itself. A paper published in August by the World Bank found that a scheme to subsidise local entrepreneurs to open schools in 199 villages increased enrolment of six- to ten-year-olds by 30 percentage points and boosted test scores. Better schools also led parents to encourage their sons to become doctors not security guards, and their daughters to become teachers rather than housewives.

Other new research suggests that policymakers can also take simple steps to fix failures in the market for low-cost private schools. For example, providing better information for parents through standardised report cards, and making it easier for entrepreneurs to obtain loans to expand schools, have both been found to lead to a higher quality of education.

Another, related lesson is that simply spending more public money is not going to transform classrooms in poor countries. The bulk of spending on public education goes on teachers’ salaries, and if they cannot teach, the money is wasted. A revealing recent study looked at what happened between 2003 and 2007, when Punjab hired teachers on temporary contracts at 35% less pay. It found that the lower wages had no discernible impact on how well teachers taught.

Such results reflect what happens when teachers are hired corruptly, rather than for their teaching skills. Yet the final and most important lesson from Pakistan is that politicians can break the link between political patronage and the classroom. Under Shahbaz Sharif, Punjab’s chief minister, the province has hired new teachers on merit, not an official’s say-so. It uses data on enrolment and test scores to hold local officials to account at regular high-stakes meetings.

Shifting from “the politics of patronage” to “the politics of performance”, in the words of Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to the British government who now works with the Punjabis, would transform public services in poor countries. Pakistan’s reforms have a long way to go. But they already have many lessons to teach the world.

It is against this background that organisations like The Citizens Foundation (TCF) have developed. The charity runs perhaps the largest network of independently run schools in the world, educating 204,000 pupils at not-for-profit schools. It is also Pakistan’s largest single employer of women outside the public sector; in an effort to make girls feel safer in class, all of TCF’s 12,000 teachers are female. At its Shirin Sultan Dossa branch near a slum on the outskirts of Karachi, one girl is more than holding her own. At break-time on the makeshift cricket pitch she is knocking boys’ spin-bowling out of the playground.

In 2016 TCF opened its first “college” for 17- and 18-year-olds at this campus in an attempt to keep smart poor pupils in school longer. Every day it buses 400 college pupils in from around the city. It builds schools using a standard template, typically raising about $250,000 for each of them from donors; it recruits and trains teachers; and it writes its own curriculums.

Since 2015 TCF has taken over the running of more than 250 government schools in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It gets a subsidy of around 715 rupees per month per child, which it tops up with donations. So far it has increased average enrolment at schools from 47 to 101 pupils, and test results have improved.

The outsourcing of state schools to TCF is just one part of the Sindh government’s recent reforms. “Three years ago we hit rock bottom,” says a senior bureaucrat, noting that 14,000 teaching jobs had been doled out in one year to supporters of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party. Since then it has used a biometric attendance register to cut 6,000 ghost teachers from the payrolls, and merged 4,000 sparsely attended schools into 1,350. Through the Sindh Education Foundation, an arms-length government body, it is funding “public-private partnerships” covering 2,414 schools and 653,265 pupils. As well as the outsourcing programme, schemes subsidise poor children to attend cheap private schools and pay entrepreneurs to set up new ones in underserved areas.

This policy was evaluated in a paper by Felipe Barrera-Osorio of Harvard University and colleagues published last August. The researchers found that in villages assigned to the scheme, enrolment increased by 30% and test scores improved. Parents raised their aspirations—they started wanting daughters to become teachers, rather than housewives. These results were achieved at a per-pupil cost comparable to that of government schools. “Pakistan’s education challenge is not underspending. It is misspending,” says Nadia Naviwala of the Wilson Centre, a think-tank.

While Sindh has pioneered many policies, Punjab has taken them furthest. The Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), another quasi-independent body, oversees some of the largest school-privatisation and school-voucher programmes in the world. It has a seat with the ministers and administrators at Mr Sharif’s quarterly meetings. The Punjab government no longer opens new schools; all growth is via these privately operated schools. Schools overseen by PEF now teach more than 3m children (an additional 11m or so remain in ordinary government-run schools).

This use of the private sector is coupled with the command-and-control of Mr Sharif, who is backed by Britain’s Department for International Development, which helps pay for support from McKinsey, a consultancy, and Sir Michael Barber, who ran British prime minister Tony Blair’s “Delivery unit”. The latest stocktake claimed an “unprecedented” 10% increase in primary-school enrolment since September 2016, an extra 68,000 teachers selected “on merit”, and a steady increase in the share of correct answers on a biannual test of literacy and numeracy.

Less than half of third graders in Pakistan can read a sentence in Urdu or local languages. Thirty-one percent can write a sentence using the word “school” in Urdu, and 11 percent can do it in English.

Children in government schools report that teachers have them clean, cook, massage their feet and buy them desserts. Children are categorized as smart or stupid as soon as they start school. Corporal punishment is severe. Parents will send their kids to a private school if they can afford a few dollars a month, but they do not see government schools as worth it.

Since 2010, Pakistan has more than doubled what it budgets for education, from $3.5 billion to $8.6 billion a year. The budget for education now rivals the official $8.7 billion military budget. The teaching force is as big as the armed forces.

But Pakistan has a learning crisis that afflicts its schoolchildren despite much debate and increase in funding for education because policy interventions by the government and foreign donors misdiagnosed what is keeping children out of school.

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Although aid programs of the United States and Britain contribute a mere 2 percent of the education budget, those countries and the local elite, whose own children go to high-end private schools, have emphasized that Pakistanis demand education and that more children should be enrolled in school.

But the demand for education is already high, evidenced by the mushrooming of low-cost private schools that now enroll 40 percent of students in the country and charge as little as $2 a month.

Foreign donors also want Pakistanis to send their girls to schools, but a 2014 Pew survey found that 86 percent of Pakistanis believe that education is equally important for boys and girls, while another 5 percent said it was more important for girls. Even in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — where Malala Yousafzai is from — government high schools for girls are enrolled beyond their capacity.

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Eighteen million of the 23 million out-of-school children in Pakistan are between 10 and 16 years old. Efforts to reach them have been negligible. These children opted out of a failing education system and now they have aged. They will not now go to school if it means starting in kindergarten. They need accelerated programs, or short crash courses in literacy and math to help them enroll with their age group.

Even if these children do not go back to school — international evidence suggests they won’t — they will, at least, become literate adults.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Pakistan launched its National Human Development Report (NHDR) – Unleashing the potential of a Young Pakistan on Wednesday at a local hotel. The report reveals that 76.9 per cent youth in Pakistan leave education for financial reasons and hope for a second chance at education.

The NHDR report-2017 reveals that Pakistan currently has the largest generation of youth ever recorded in its history, making it one of the youngest countries in the world and the second youngest in the South Asian region after Afghanistan.

The study aims to understand Pakistan’s human development challenges and opportunities from the prism of youth. It focuses on how to improve human development outcomes by empowering young people, addressing the root causes of the obstacles, and by proposing innovative ways to surmount challenges.

The Pakistan NHDR 2017 has reached out to nearly 130,000 individuals across the country out of which 90 per cent were youth making it essentially a report “by the youth, for the youth”.

According to the report in Pakistan, 64 per cent of the total population is below the age of 30 and 29 per cent is between the ages of 15-29 years. Therefore, it presents a unique window of opportunity for the country and by investment in quality education, employment and meaningful engagements, primarily can help to empower youth.

“In Pakistan the current median age of 22.5 is expected to hover at around 31 years by 2050, beyond which, the window of opportunity will start to close for good,” anticipates the report.

The study further reveals that in Pakistan youth between the age of 15-29 years make up 41.6 per cent of the county’s total labour force. In addition, almost four million youth attain working age every year.

“In order to absorb this populace into job market…Pakistan needs to create 4.5 million new jobs over the next five years which indicates 0.9 million jobs annually,” suggests the report.

Human Development Index (HDI)

The NHDR highlights wide differences in the state of choices and opportunities available for people living in different cities/localities in Pakistan. Among major cities of the country, Islamabad has the highest HDI of 0.875, followed by Azad Jammu and Kashmir with an HDI 0.734; whereas Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) recorded the lowest HDI at 0.216.

On the other hand, Punjab has the highest HDI of 0.732 whereas Balochistan has the lowest HDI of 0.421. The other two provinces, Sindh and K-P perform relatively better and fall in the medium human development category.

With regards to the district-wise breakdown, the report reveals that out of the ten top performing districts, four belong to K-P, three to Punjab, and two to Sindh, whereas six of the ten worst performing districts belong to Sindh and four to Balochistan.

Education

The report highlighting the current net enrollment growth rate of the country of 0.92 per cent predicts that it will take another 60 years to reach the target of zero out-of-school children.

It further states that a staggering 9.45 million children at the primary level were estimated to be out of school in 2015.

“Therefore to achieve this goal by 2030…Pakistan must increase its net enrollment ratio to a yearly growth of 3.8 per cent,” suggests the report.

The study reveals that Pakistan’s increased educational attainment levels have failed to reduce the socio-economic deprivation of a significant section of the population.

Youth vote

The report while quoting National Youth Perception Survey states that only 24 per cent of youth expressed to have trust in politicians. However, approximately 90 per cent male and 55 per cent female expressed their intention to vote in the 2018 general elections.

Education - especially primary and secondary schooling - is perhaps the most-discussed topic in Pakistan. Poor education has not only hindered the country's efforts to eradicate poverty and boost growth, but has also exacerbated issues like gender inequality, social conflicts and even terrorism. For an ethnically and socially diverse country like Pakistan, education carries heavy political significance for nation-building, as it builds common symbols and values.

Even though the provision of free and compulsory education for all children from 5-16 years old is mandated in the Constitution of Pakistan, the reality has long been lamentable, if not outright atrocious. A high drop-out rate in lower grades, a low graduation rate at higher grades, and the gender difference in enrollment which is even wider than that of Afghanistan have bedeviled education in Pakistan. For example, most Pakistani children drop out of school by the age of 9 and only 3 percent complete the 12th grade.

Despite the Pakistani government's commitment to both Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education for All (EFA), there were still more than 22.6 million children out of school in late 2016. More seriously, those in school suffered badly from teacher absenteeism and poor learning environments.

Poor education naturally leads to miserable student performance: Only about half of Pakistanis who complete five years of primary education are literate, and only just over 40 percent of third-graders from rural schools demonstrate passable arithmetic skills like subtraction and addition. Facing the likely scenario of their children learning nothing despite years in school, many parents decide to make the children help in the fields instead.

The Pakistani government, both at central and provincial levels, has undertaken major policy efforts to improve the coverage and quality of education. The education authority was devolved from the federal government to the provinces in 2010, and most provinces have more than doubled their education budgets since then. Impressively, in 2016 Pakistani provinces spent as much as 17 to 28 percent of their budgets on education agendas, whereas the global average was merely 14 percent.

However, despite growing financial resources and political capital being directed into the education system, the results remain largely uncertain. After all, given the fact that Pakistan's education problems are firmly rooted in the country's deeper social and political soil, it will not be easy to make progress.

What Pakistan needs is to spend better, not simply to spend more. The political element in education spending is so strong that increased budgets are often translated into jobs as political patronage, rather than yielding improvements in education. The logic is straightforward: Politicians hand out permanent teaching positions in exchange for their constituents' votes and loyalty, while these teachers function as the patron's political organizers.

In a sense, swelling the ranks of teachers appears to "kill two birds with one stone" for politicians: it appears to address educational problems, helping them to win over more supporters, and it buttresses their personal political base. It's no surprise that education departments have become the single largest employers in most provinces. Strikingly, Pakistan's educational sector is now as big as its armed forces, and the education budget of $8.6 billion in 2016 came second only to the $8.7 billion military bill.

As more and more over-paid teachers enter schools with patronage shielding them from any potential disciplinary proceedings, not only will existing issues like teacher absenteeism get worse, other much-needed social programs may also suffer from insufficient resources.

Teachers who earn high salaries but don’t show up to school. Even if they do, they might not do much once they get there. Students who can’t read basic sentences after three years in a classroom, and drop out altogether by age 9. And ironically, a government that’s doubled its education budget in the last eight years.

Pakistan’s education system has been called a “crisis,” and its reforms “frenetic.” The former chief minister of Punjab fired a significant portion of government teachers, and today over 40 percent of the country’s students are enrolled in schools that are either privately run or sustained on philanthropy. With a new government set to come in, led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, what does that mean for education?

Nadia Naviwala is a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center, where she authored a report called, “Pakistan’s Education Crisis: The Real Story.” She is also a senior advisor for The Citizens Foundation, which educates over 200,000 students in philanthropy-supported schools across Pakistan. BRIGHT Magazine caught up with Naviwala about the root causes of Pakistan’s education crisis, the importance of political will in solving it, and the surprisingly minimal role of international donors.

BRIGHT Magazine: I read your story in the New York Times about how Pakistan can’t spend its way out of the education crisis. What are the root causes of the education crisis, and why are they not related to money?

Nadia Naviwala: Pakistan’s education crisis comes down to a crisis of teaching and learning, which is not something that money can solve. You can look at some of the best education systems in the world, and they are not necessarily the ones that spend the most. Efficiency is also really important. You can even look within Pakistan: The provinces and districts that are spending more are not necessarily the ones that have stronger education systems. Pakistan has doubled its education budget since 2010, but we haven’t seen either the improvement in enrollment or the learning value you’d expect.

NN: The majority of the education budget, about 85 percent, goes into teachers’ salaries. If your teachers aren’t showing up to school, or if they aren’t doing anything when they get to school, then it really doesn’t make a difference how much money you’re pouring in.

No one has quite figured out what to do. Once you get teachers to school, how do you improve learning outcomes for kids? This is the reason for high rates of illiteracy in schools in Pakistan.

Two of Pakistan’s four provinces, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), have achieved a few things regarding education reforms. First, they fixed school infrastructure, because Pakistan was — and still is — a place where going to school is dangerous because the facilities are just so dilapidated. Second was making teachers show up to school. The [provincial] governments started sending someone to school every month to make sure the teacher was there, which resulted in teacher absenteeism plummeting.

So for the next government, their challenge is adherence, and also taking some of these reforms to other provinces, so we don’t send the country into four completely different directions. We know how to make schools look like schools, we know how to get teachers to show up. There is still this problem of illiteracy rates, and the fact that a child can go to school for 3–5 years and still not be able to read a sentence in Urdu or a local language.

This is risky but I am going to argue it anyway. I strongly believe that liberal democracy is the best way to run a country. People like me, who believe this, are often tempted to argue that democracy leads to, or its even a requirement for, other good things, like peace, social progress, health improvement, and economic growth. But here's the thing, and it is hard to accept: the evidence does not support this stance.

Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies. South Korea moved from Level 1 to Level 3 (Rosling divides countries into 4 levels in terms of development, not the usual two categories of developed and developing) faster than any other country had ever done (without finding oil), al the time as a military dictatorship. Of the ten countries with the fastest economic growth, nine of them score low on democracy.

Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It's better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like.

Ghost schools, bogus enrolment, absent teachers, out-of-school children — Pakistan’s public-sector school education system is trapped in complicated challenges. Punjab alone has over 52,000 schools, more than 12 million students and close to 400,000 teachers. Around four years ago, the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) started rolling out a series of IT systems for monitoring schools, computerising school enrolment and ensuring teacher presence. Our system works on computer tablets, enabling close to 1,300 monitoring officers to randomly visit schools each month and report data about school facilities, teacher presence and student attendance. The data is geo-tagged (using the tablet’s GPS system), and must be submitted from the vicinity of the school to be accepted by our system. The report must also include geo-tagged pictures of the attendance register and the head teacher, as well as a selfie of the monitoring officer, as evidence of the visit. In the last four years, over 1.9 million inspection reports have been uploaded in the system. In a recent study, Alif Ailaan found our monitoring data to be highly correlated (over 93% correlation) with their independent assessments.

We make all the monitoring data public in real-time to make the entire exercise fully transparent and enable all stakeholders to hold the government accountable. This data can be viewed by visiting, http://open.punjab.gov.pk/schools/. On our website, besides real-time inspection data of schools, there are comparisons with previous years to track progress and link to the official school census data for a baseline comparison.

Moreover, the same system is used to also measure Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). As part of each school visit, the monitoring officer is mandated to conduct a pop quiz of 7-10 students using another testing application on their tablets. The quiz is generated by automatic test generation software, populated with millions of multiple-choice questions devised to measure 17 students learning outcomes from the government’s official curriculum. Currently focused on grade 3 students to measure their learning and numeracy, over 35 million tablet-based spot tests have been conducted by our monitoring officers, and the data is uploaded in real-time to our system. This learning outcome data is also made public on the same website. Our website enables visitors to compare districts across 17 SLOs and analyse the performance of grade 3 students across Punjab in terms of their basic learning and numeracy.-------------

In order to evaluate the intervention, we ran a Randomised Control Trial (RCT) in 60 schools in Punjab. The one-year study, soon to be published in a research paper, produced exceptional results: Math scores of students improved by 120%; Science scores improved by 52%. Overall, the schools in which e-learn was used showed 74% improvement in test scores. The monthly project cost was less than Rs75 per student.

Currently, the project is being scaled up to over 800 high schools in Punjab. This equivalent of Pakistan’s own Khan Academy, and its application in classrooms, could become a blueprint to improve teaching standards and learning outcomes throughout the country.

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I am the Founder and President of PakAlumni Worldwide, a global social network for Pakistanis, South Asians and their friends. I also served as Chairman of the NEDians Convention 2007. In addition to being a South Asia watcher, an investor, business consultant and avid follower of the world financial markets, I have more than 25 years experience in the hi-tech industry. I have been on the faculties of Rutgers University and NED Engineering University and cofounded two high-tech startups, Cautella, Inc. and DynArray Corp and managed multi-million dollar P&Ls. I am a pioneer of the PC and mobile businesses and I have held senior management positions in hardware and software development of Intel’s microprocessor product line from 8086 to Pentium processors. My experience includes senior roles in marketing, engineering and business management. I was recognized as “Person of the Year” by PC Magazine for my contribution to 80386 program. I have an MS degree in Electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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